Whispers in the dark
by awkwardacity
Summary: When Team Flash lock Barry in the pipeline to stop him from racing Zoom, things go wrong and he ends up there far longer than intended. In the dark, Barry descends into madness.


The last thing he sees before the pipeline door slid shut is Iris, staring defiantly at him. He shouts, screams at them, knowing that there is no way for them to hear him through the many layers of security doors he can hear locking shut - but he doesn't care.

He doesn't know how long he beats his fists against the glass until they're bloody, how long he yells at the top of his lungs until his throat is raw, but eventually he has exhausted himself so much that his limbs shake, and his legs give way from underneath him and send him crumpling to the floor.

Violent sobs rack his body, the energy to do anything more suddenly drained from him in despair. He has no idea how long he has been locked up here, but he knows that without him his friends will die. Maybe they're already dead. Why couldn't they see that the only way to defeat Zoom was for Barry to race him?

Iris' face flashes before his eyes. All of his friends, a unified front against him.

He glares accusingly up into the corner of his cell, where he knows the camera is. He hopes Cisco, Caitlin, Harry - all of them - are watching him. He hopes the guilt is eating them up inside, convincing them to come back down and let him out.

He pinches himself then, shakes his head to clear the vindictive thoughts clouding it. They were just trying to save him.

 _And you were just trying to save them_ , a part of him reasons; he ignores it.

His knuckles are already healed, he discovers, when he partially removes his suit. It's incredibly hot in his cell, and without a single light source it's pitch black, too. He supposes none of them have ever had much reason to care for the fate and well-being of the occupants of these cells, so the subject has never really come up before.

Now, enduring it himself, he wonders how any of them ever thought this was suitable for human habitation, no matter what that person had done. He's read studies of how the human brain is affected by long periods of sense deprivation - and its never a happy-ending story.

How long until the same fate applies to him?

* * *

There is no way to judge time in the pipeline, except if you measure in heartbeats. The deafening quiet makes Barry want to scream just to hear something, and in fact that's exactly what he does. He runs in circles around the small, cramped cell to exercise, to hear his footsteps, to see anything by the tiny flashes of lightning leaping off him. He even tries hurling the lightning at the door, but it does no good. Cisco is just too good at his job.

The rest of the time he just lies hunched in the corner of his cell. He hears the ghost of Zoom's triumphant laughter in his ears. A voice whispers next to him, filling the silence with taunts.

" _They're all going to die, Barry. There's nothing you can do_."

He can't tell if the voice sounds more like Eobard Thawne, Zoom or himself.

* * *

Sometimes he sees their faces before his eyes. They flicker in and out of existence, and yet every time it takes Barry longer to realise they can't be there. He sees Caitlin, eyes shining and heart breaking. He sees Cisco, spluttering and stumbling over non-existent words. He sees Iris, staring back at him with steely determination.

How long has he been in this cell? How many of his friends are already dead? Maybe that's why they haven't come to let him out yet. Surely their plan for defeating Zoom - without him - was never supposed to take this long?

All of a sudden his heart constricts at the thought of the cell door opening. What sort of world will he walk into? A pile of broken bodies at Zoom's feet?

He _needs_ to race Zoom. It's not just about Jay wanting to be the fastest. For all of the times his friends have talked of Jay's power-mad quest driving him crazy, Barry has stayed silent - because Jay's not the only one who wants, who needs, to be the fastest.

Barry _needs_ to be the fastest, needs to prove to himself - and everyone else - that he can never be outrun. That no one he cares about will be murdered because he wasn't fast enough.

He hates them, he thinks momentarily. He hates them all.

* * *

Flashes of blue lightning jump before his eyes, but every time he chases after them he's reminded painfully by the glass wall of his cell that they're not real.

" _You're just like me_ ," Jay tells him. He's sitting across from Barry, leaning back lazily against the door of the cell.

"I'm nothing like you," Barry spits venomously. "You're not even real."

" _Who are you to say what's real and what's not_?"

Barry lunges at him, but the other speedster phases through the glass of the door before Barry can even touch him.

He spends the next god-knows-how-long trying to phase through the glass, too - because if Jay can do then he must be able to do it as well. But no such luck. All he gains from it is a ringing headache and - he suspects - a broken wrist.

So he sits. Curled into the corner of the cell, knees pulled up to his chest. He hugs himself tight, so tightly it hurts - but the pain grounds him. In the uniform darkness, this is what sets him apart from it. The only thing keeping him from drowning.

He imagines his - his _friends_ , watching him through the camera. So many times he had watched from the other side of the lens, watched as the metahumans he had captured raged and ranted and curled in on themselves. He had always thought they were all insane before they went into the pipeline.

Now he knows different.

* * *

The darkness is comforting. It seeps through his skin, suffusing into him. It's a cold wash through his blood stream, followed by a blinding fire burning inside him. It whispers to him; reassurances. He's not alone in the pitch black. The darkness is there with him, around him, inside him.

It fills him up with something - something he can't quite identify. At first it feels alien, shifting, uncomfortable under his skin. Then it becomes a comfort, an ever-present reminder. It gives him a purpose. It gives him a _target_.

* * *

Jay comes and goes as he pleases, and each time the malice in his grin seems to lessen. Barry stops ignoring him. He stops lunging at him, desperately grabbing at thin air.

Today he sits beside Barry, making flashes of blue lightning with his hands and throwing them carelessly at the glass.

"You feel it, don't you?" he asks, letting the last bolt flicker out into nothing more than an after image in Barry's eyes.

"Feel what?" Barry lifts his head from where it was resting despondently against his knees.

"The darkness."

"Yeah."

"And?"

"Y'know, I thought you were crazy."

"I am crazy."

"Guess that makes me crazy too."

"Well, you're talking to me, aren't you?"

A silence settles between the two of them, but it's no longer filled with tension and anger as Barry often imagines talking with Jay should be.

"You're just like me," Jay tells him. This time Barry knows better than before.

He nods. "Yeah, I am."


End file.
